This week’s Tax Prof Spotlight of Steven Dean (Brooklyn) continues our series of profiles of folks starting their careers this fall as tenure-track tax professors at American law schools. We hope the profiles will help introduce our newest tax colleagues to the academic tax community.

Having flatly ruled out attending law school during my senior year at Williams College, I am sometimes surprised to find myself a newly minted member of Brooklyn Law School’s faculty. I was lucky enough to discover tax law while working for a group of economists studying transfer pricing issues. Right away I was hooked. I am, if anything, more excited about tax law now than I was then. That would probably worry anyone who remembers my interest in tax during my first year of law school at Yale (including Professor Anne Alstott, who had to persuade me that it would probably not be wise to take her International Tax class concurrently with Federal Income Tax).

I started practicing at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and later moved to Debevoise & Plimpton. My years in practice proved to be an incredible learning experience. The smart, dedicated tax lawyers who showed me the ropes earned my gratitude and my respect. Taking a few LLM classes at NYU (including one taught by Ethan Yale, now a fellow tax newbie at Georgetown (profiled here on Sept. 25)) helped me supplement the relatively small number of tax classes I was able to take at Yale.

Now, I am doing my best to give my students the benefit of whatever useful knowledge I acquired doing deals and in my time at Yale and NYU. This semester I am teaching Federal Income Tax and next semester I’ll teach Corporate Tax.

My research agenda has two parts. In addition to writing on mainstream tax topics, such as the entity classification piece I plan to tackle first, I intend to focus on issues related to developing countries and to tax havens in particular. Having grown up in the Bahamas (with an economy that is roughly two parts tourism and one part offshore finance), understanding what the future holds for tax havens is not just an academic exercise for me.

Each Saturday, TaxProf Blog shines the spotlight on one of the 700+ tax professors in America’s law schools. We hope to help bring the many individual stories of scholarly achievements, teaching innovations, public service, and career moves within the tax professorate to the attention of the broader tax community. Please email me suggestions for future Tax Prof Profiles, particularly for our series on new tax professors. For prior Tax Prof Profiles, see here.